The present invention relates generally to the automated manufacturing of articles which are customized in accordance with customer preferences and more particularly to a system for the manufacturing of uniform insignia badges worn by military personnel where customer preference information received at the time of order entry is used to control the manufacturing process.
Virtually all enlisted and officer grade personnel in the military are required to wear uniforms. Typically, these uniforms will include one or more insignia badges which display the name, rank and job function in the military performed by that person. Often, these insignia badges are required to be used on certain uniforms.
In one embodiment of the insignia badge 5 shown on FIG. 21, a small rectangular piece of black leather 8, typically 2.0".times.4.0", is used to display an insignia graphical element 6 and custom text 7 by being sewn on or attached to the uniform of the wearer. In the manufacture of the badge 5, a hot foil stamping machine is used to first imprint on the surface of the leather 8 a graphical element 6 representing the rank and/or military job function of the person, selected from several hundred such insignia which have been established by the military over the years. When an order is received for a badge with that graphical element 6, one or more lines of the customized text 7 (name, rank, and branch information) selected by the wearer is then stamped onto the leather 8 in a pre-defined relationship with respect to the graphical element 6. Accordingly, the Military Clothing Sales Stores (MCSS), of which there are hundreds located at the various military bases and posts throughout the United States and the world, have been patronized by thousands of military personnel to select and order customized insignia badges to be placed on their uniforms.
Because it is inefficient for each MCSS to stock the hundreds of various standard insignia badges and/or to equip themselves with the stamping machines and related hardware necessary to customize the insignia badges with the custom text, the military has in the past contracted with third parties to provide the inventory and customized manufacturing operations. In accordance with the prior art badge manufacturing systems, the various MCSS locations would collect the orders from their base personnel for customized insignia badges and transmit them by mail or other conventional means to a local manufacturing locations. The information associated with these various orders would then be compiled at the various manufacturing locations and physically distributed to various stamping machine operators within the factory for manufacturing of the various insignia badges. The printed order information would then be used by the operators to set-up the badge stamping machines. The operators would manually control at least the Y-axis (line-to-line) position of the custom text stamped on the badges.
The prior art method, involving processing of orders and manufacturing operations in multiple locations, has been awkward and inefficient. For example, many man-hours must be dedicated in the use of this prior art system to the processing of orders, sorting of orders by insignia type and/or MCSS location, distributing the orders to the various machine operator locations around the factory, and providing information to and/or manually controlling the foil stamping machines needed to place the custom text on the insignia badges. This inefficiency has substantially delayed the processing of orders and increased the cost of manufacturing because of the labor burden.
What is needed, then, is a manufacturing system for customized military uniform insignia badges in which orders taken at the various MCSS locations can be efficiently processed and used to directly control the manufacturing operations, minimizing the involvement of human effort in the system. Such a manufacturing system is lacking in the prior art.